I Have Much To Learn

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the words “package store”?

I was in the parking lot of the ABC Package Store down the road from my new place, with a large box I needed to mail in the passenger’s seat, about to get out of the car when Brian called.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I couldn’t find the UPS Store I mapquested before I left,” I said, “so I’m at the package store. Hopefully I can mail my box from here.”

“Wait, the package store?”

“Yeah. The ABC Package Store. On Timber Road. To mail that big box?”

Suffice it to say, had Brian not called at that moment, I would have taken my box into the ABC Package Store only to discover that it was in fact a liquor store. Because in North Carolina, liquor stores are known as package stores. Well, duh!

“I guess that explains the sign out front that says ‘No Loitering.’ I was wondering who would want to loiter outside a package store. I mean, how exciting would that make this town?”

Brian and I are in disagreement as to whether it would have been more hilarious if he hadn’t called, and I had lugged my box inside and tried to mail it. I feel that I probably would have covered it well.

“I need to mail this pack…age…But while I’m here, I’ll take a fifth of Wild Turkey.”

Really? How could I have missed that! I have never seen a package store in MA that was a liquor store….or, perhaps, I never went IN to a package store, because I always wanted to buy liquor, and not to mail packages. Thus I never learned.

It’s kind of like when I was little growing up in Manhattan, and all the signs for parking garages said ‘PARK’ and I always wondered why we never went to any of those neat-looking underground parks.

They’re not called package stories (or “packies”) here in Boston so much any more, but they definitely are in Western Mass. The first store I went to in Great Barrington was a package store, because I needed duct tape or something.

To me “package store” sounds like where you go to buy male genitalia, of which one can never have enough. But liquor stores were “ABC Stores” in Virginia, too. This confused me when we moved to Honolulu.